Soul, and: Beethoven, and: String

When a man you love and have no right to,since you know him as his words alone,

says that he loafs and invites his soul,tell me, Reader, who gives the invitation.

Is every reader who writes always twolooking to the mirror of each, the threads

of light between them broken by the eye.Just this evening I drove past the throb

of an ambulance beacon beside a car,crushed and shattered, and someone looking in,

and I saw, inside the windshield awashin the deep red light, the ghost of a man.

Or was it my reflection, my headlight glare,how, as I turned, it grew brighter, sharper,

as personal possessions do when welove and lose them. Whitman left us so little

of his private story, his lovers who died,whose stories died soon after, however

adored with a fierceness equal to scorn.But I feel them in there still, in harbor

whistles and moans and the blood-red lanterngoing down on the last of the Hudson.

Always a story inside a story and so on,the center of us so strange now it ceases

to be center. Or us. But there it is:beneficiary of the night’s cold

water and broken glass that summon usto our own reflection, looking in.

Soul, I would sing goodbye like a birdabove the cradle of the sea, but death

keeps making you appear. Death that ispersonal one moment and then road

after road I drive, setting out. My mistakescome to me at night and say, cheer up,

you made good, let go of the face you losein any case, and then the face under that,

each face pressed through the one before.My dreams remember so much they must

have been there all along, taking note,or dreaming up the man I am who makes

amends, spends cash, eliminates choicesthat are the musical chairs of days that end.

If night makes large and dark the inner eye,if it takes us down like a political poster

for some lost cause, or memory, or era,if the thrum of cars in the body’s tunnel

becomes one enormous car, one breatherdrugged in smoke, why call it ours, this soul.

Does it come down to volition, the thein the ghost in the many-geared machine,

the lone hand whose signature of choicesmake us find another, until, exhausted,

we drag what remains of freedom to bed.I choose therefore I am, and yet the core

of me that dreams is choices given away.Some days my dreaming gives my sleep away.

It says goodbye like the last frightenedlook of a woman one cannot keep or lose.

Long ago, as my mother lay unconscious,I took a walk alone and bought a watch.

When I returned, the hospice nurse showed me his,just like mine, and it meant nothing, although

we feigned surprise, and beneath our talkmy mother’s breathing made the sound of oceans.

But what if it is nothing, then, what then.Soul-making. Keats saw these times that way,

and maybe it mattered less what he could prove.If he coughed a little blood on the book

that gave him comfort, maybe some desireswere facts turned words turned unheard music

in the soulful reaches of Rome in ruins.The old gods were fierce with persuasions

to take him in. When he talked of soul,maybe he saw death’s shadow, what death made:

the soul as an old god looking for believers.Like nature looking to flower through the wreckage

of a sad machine. Are there no centers leftto understand some parts of us as phony.

What remains, soul, when we say goodbyeto the face beneath the face and so on,

in the partial mirror of the windshield,the red light washing over us in waves.

Long ago, my mother read me storiesin the dark to make me droopy and brave.

And just before I drifted off, she spoketo me, as oceans do, in every...